Huh?? F-35s don’t need radars.

Their primary purpose is bombing schools, hospitals, and refugee camps – none of which move or pose a threat.

LoL @ the downvotes. Step one is acknowledging one’s addiction.

I wonder if a smartphone with e-ink display would be a good solution.

Good enough for secure messaging & calling apps, usable with their existing touch-UIs, yet devoid of the addictive potential enabled by vibrant colour, smooth-scroll, and video.

Can even still use the camera – just need to wait until you ‘develop’ them by transferring to another device/medium with full colour or a video-capable display.

I prefer browser(web)-based banking apps which work well on a phone UI without the info-access creep.

UBank (NAB subsidary) and Wise (not a bank) both support passkeys for login in the browser. Most other banks here seem to have regressed from hardware tokens to SMS codes or proprietary apps for their MFA.

Passkeys are only as secure as your passkeys – I use Bitwarden with master password re-prompt checked for bank credentials, but I should probably switch to a hardware based passkey (at least for unlocking Bitwarden itself).

The phone apps are sometimes required to do some things (like managing passkeys for UBank, verifying ID in Wise). They work on LineageOS without the google stuff, but might be worth installing only temporarily in a separate profile or phone.

Retail payments – just use a physical card if you’re not using cash.

Yes: https://prosody.im/doc/turn

Further notes on implementing calling with XMPP: https://gist.github.com/iNPUTmice/a28c438d9bbf3f4a3d4c663ffaa224d9

…seems like things may have stagnated around group calling; for now probably need to consider something more video conferencing specific like jitsi or bigbluebutton.

Yeah, it’d be a live monitoring footprint limited to, say, wherever you have/bring a personal device plus maybe wherever there’s a wifi network it knows. But you’d be able to see where the tag was when it last pinged you, so you could return to that location to search for it and get a more accurate location fix.

The only case my example doesn’t cover is if a third party moves the tag away from your typical footprint and networks.

I don’t want an even higher level spyware device.

but I use […] AirTags regularly

Hmm…

It might be time to move on from the mass-surveillance-on-every-single-device style of object location tracking.
Are there localising/tracking bluetooth tags available which only connect to your network/devices?

you’d have to design your own charger and battery management modules

Just searched for “Sodium-ion BMS” on Aliexpress:

A few years ago I was using “Call Recorder” which seemed good at the time, but right now hasn’t had any work done on it since 2023.

It was on f-droid, but the author threw a tantrum at f-droid about donations.

One prominent example in Australia is via one of the two biggest nationwide supermarket chains, Coles: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/coles-to-run-palantir-analytics-suite-across-its-supermarkets-604698

Huh, first I’ve seen that writeup. First in-depth well-reasoned set of criticisms I’ve read on the XMPP+OMEMO setup, which is my goto and usual recommendation (and what I still find most power-efficient on a degoogled phone, most usable and reliable despite its stagnation).

Gives a good overview of the accumulated technical debt/chaos beneath the surface. Really hope that conversations and omemo can sort out their mess, or that other clients like kaidan can rise up and push omemo forward, because xmpp itself has been a solid foundation.

https://tosdr.org/ for summaries.

Yeah, there’s a distinct lack of nonsense with Migadu.

Something from here, if you want an Android device: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

Sure, an individual can prevent their own devices collecting data about them, but the paper is about all the devices surrounding a person in other people’s pockets/homes/workplaces: collecting data on – recording – that individual.

[…] The researchers discovered that even if individual users turned off data tracking and didn’t share their own information, their mobility patterns could still be predicted with surprising accuracy based on data collected from their acquaintances.

“Worse,” says Ghoshal, “almost as much latent information can be extracted from perfect strangers that the individual tends to co-locate with.”

In many (most?) jurisdictions it is illegal to make a recording of a conversation either which you are not party to, or without consent of all parties involved; sometimes with consideration towards whether there was reasonable expectation that the conversation be private. Even when legal, there are often restrictions on how that recording can be used.

The laws aren’t always written specific to audio/video recording (not that always-recording by google/apple/amazon/etc isn’t a problem already…) – how does such surveillance figure in to existing legislation around the world?